No, I can’t believe it either: exactly one week remains before I re-start my career as a bench scientist. In two day’s time I pack up my desk, bid a tearful, even maternal farewell to my lovely team of young editors and jump ship from science publishing. In the process, I leave behind a permanent position, a managerial role, a predicable career ladder and a comfortable salary. And next Thursday, I wash ashore at a lab in University College London, a newly-minted, badly out-of-practice post-doctoral fellow of molecular genetics with only eighteen months of not-quite-so-comfortable salary guaranteed. Beyond that, the aforementioned void lurks, an omnipresent nothingness in which hardly anything is certain or predictable.
To be honest, though the thought of what happens when I get there, and of my long-term future, is making me sweat a little, what’s truly worrying is the grant application deadline looming just a day after I start. All 33 pages of it. More specifically, the 3,500 word research proposal forming the heart of this not inconsiderable document.
First there are the stakes. This is a four-year fellowship, including a higher salary, travel and consumables. Eighteen months will pass in the blink of an eye, but with four years, I feel confident I can work out my next stepping-stone. As a non-EU citizen on a migrant visa who wants to remain on this fair island, and at my age (39), such considerations are not trivial.
But stakes aside, I seem to be as rusty with the grant-writing process itself as I most likely will prove to be with pipetting devices, microscope and gel apparatus next week.
This rustiness gradually became apparent a few months ago when I started brushing up on my new field. As a ‘civilian’, I was solely dependent on my future lab head to share his literature collection with me. Without a research affiliation, I am effectively the equivalent of a developing-world scientist. In the absence of a single subscription I rely on handouts; also, I find myself gravitating gratefully to the open access green fields of BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Springer’s Open Choice. For many quick checks, I can only look at abstracts: frustrating.
But the real problem is a mental one. One of the main things you learn as a handling editor is to consider the big picture while more or less discarding the fine details. In essence, your brain becomes a highly trained, large-pore sieve through which the majority of items wash through. A scientific paper is a 6,000 word document of which only a small fraction really counts: the words that tell you why the authors chose to study their particular question; that tell you what, actually, is an advance over what is already known, and why we should care. An incredibly complicated document that must be assessed, digested and classified in a matter of minutes, and I can tell you that such an assessment leaves little room for registering, let along remembering, the little details.
But for a scientist, especially one writing a grant, the details are crucial. And initially, I found myself reading through papers with an editorial agenda, my mind automatically going to the default ‘skim’ mode, eager to race ahead, to discard the acronyms and gene names and conditions in favor of the big picture. At first, I would have to read the same paragraph five times to retain even a fraction of the nitty-gritty. Over the days and weeks, grimly determined, I patiently retrained my brain to absorb like a scientist instead of an editor. I made lots of sketches and penned line after line of questions in the margins – used a highlighter pen as profligately as an undergraduate. I pestered my future lab head by email with silly questions (to his credit, he answered them all with swiftness and good humor). And then I started to write: hesitant paragraphs slowly growing more confident as I got to grips with what it is I want to achieve in a four-year research program. Little by little, the skills come back: hypotheses, controls, caveats, differential outcomes.
And I suppose I am grateful that the grant deadline has made me address all this now. Before I pick up that pipettor and perform my first experiment, I need not only to be manipulating reagents like a scientist, but actually thinking like one.
It must be very exciting to get back to the uncertainties of research. It is quite unusual for ex-bench scientists to return, as most PhDs I knew couldn’t wait to leave the bench, but you will probably look at research with a sharper, better eye after being away from it. I totally understand the daunting task of writing a 3500 word proposal, and then the stress of waiting 6 or so months before you hear whether the reviewers think you are worthy of support. It’s great to read that you have not given up on research. Best of luck with your grant proposal and UCL!
Thanks for your kind words, Jeff. It is very exciting, actually, though at this stage the anxiety is overshadowing things a bit. I don’t want to jinx myself (she says unscientifically), but the applicant pool for this grant will be fairly limited: career-restarters who’ve been away from the bench for more than two years for any reason but who have decent track record. If this phenomenon is as rare as you say, it can only work in my favor!
You are very brave. I felt my stomach clenching in anxiety just reading your post.
Thanks, Henry. Actually I am generally quite risk-averse; I was one of those schoolkids who would never break a rule for fear of the consequences. So part of me is not entirely sure where all of this is coming from. I suspect the main thing is the realization that if it all went horribly wrong, I could probably return to publishing, or support myself entirely as a freelance writer. Something my father once told me is also a factor – but I’ll save that story for the next post!
Good luck Jenny. That’s so cool that it’s all coming back 🙂 A testament to your training? I’m really excited for you, even as I contemplate and prepare for exactly the opposite move! 😀
The water’s good on both sides, Brooks! And the division between is pretty thin.
You’re 39??? So is science the secret of youth, not that Boots serum?
More seriously, that’s an interesting difference you’ve highlighted – I wonder how often you’re going to be thinking of the “why am I diong this, what’s the headline?”
Pshaw, Scott, you old charmer.
I think I will always be thinking about the big picture. My four-year stint in a start-up was quite useful for that sort of focus – if stuff wasn’t working, eventually you had to stop (instead of banging your head against the wall). You were constantly having to justify what you were doing – not so much ‘what’s the headline’ but ‘where’s the drug target’? I’d like to keep some of that industrial tough love and resist going all mad professory.